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Rig your art with bones and meshes, animate it, render it as film, and ship it to any game engine. Free forever.

_{Windows · macOS · Linux · or the full editor in your browser, nothing to install}

Website · Documentation · Devlog · Add-ons

_{Listed on AlternativeTo next to Spine, DragonBones and Live2D}

_{▶ Watch Rigby2D 0.4: everything new in 45 seconds · Also: Meet NILA, our mascot, animated in Rigby2D}

_{The editor animating NILA: the head bone selected in the tree, its keys in the dopesheet, its pose in the inspector.}

• YouTube architectural review: Rigby2D GitHub Explained: 2D Rigging Across Game and Film Runtimes by Alex Hitt — an 8-minute technical breakdown of AutoRig mesh topology, deterministic physics solver parity across engines, the Game and Film workspaces, and the built-in MCP server.
• Polydium (CG · VFX · Game Daily Briefing): Rigby2D — 레이어 PSD를 자동으로 리깅하는 오픈소스 2D 스켈레탈 애니메이션 에디터 — featured in the Polydium Pipeline Briefing for Korean game and VFX studios.
• Open-source & AI indexes: Listed in Trendshift Top Game Engine Open-Source Projects (2026), Nicheloom, and Context7.

Read the documentation: guides with screenshots for every part of the editor, the runtimes and the MCP server. The pages are also in docs/.

• AutoRig: a layered PSD becomes an editable rig in one step: bones, joints, bending meshes and IK.
• Full rigging toolset: bones, weighted meshes, linked meshes, image sequences, skins, events, clipping and paths, with IK, transform, path, physics and slider constraints.
• Animation: Setup and Animate modes, dopesheet, graph editor with Bézier handles, onion skinning, pose library, face controls and retargeting between characters.
• Film workspace: 4K, timecode, an animatable camera, audio tracks, viseme lip-sync with on-device Whisper transcription, and renders to PNG sequences, WebM with alpha and MP4.
• Scene composition (new in 0.3): several characters on one stage as actors with NLE-style clips (trim, speed, loops, crossfades, their own audio), painted layers with parallax, and a camera, and they play in games through every runtime. See Scenes.
• A focused editor: Game and Film workspaces, panels you can resize or pop out to a second monitor, Open recent, and a searchable shortcut reference with Reference and Blender-like keys.
• Your work is safe: saves that never leave a half-written file, .rigby1 backups like Blender's .blend1, auto-save, and crash recovery that offers unsaved work back at the next start. See Saving and recovery.
• Preferences and add-ons: Edit ▸ Preferences for the language (English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese), interface scale, shortcuts, undo steps, backups and auto-save, and an add-on gallery for sandboxed Python add-ons that add tools. See Add-ons.
• Welcome screen, auto-update and runtimes from the editor: new projects, recent work, starter projects and lessons at startup; signed updates in the desktop app; File ▸ Get runtimes for Unity, Godot and Phaser.
• Coming from other tools: opens Spine exports (with a migration checker) and DragonBones projects. See Coming from Spine and Coming from DragonBones.
• Python scripting and custom tools, and a built-in MCP server so AI assistants such as Claude can inspect, rig and animate your projects.
• Lossless skeleton JSON (3.8, 4.2, 4.3) and binary .skel with texture atlases, played by the JavaScript, Phaser, Rust, Unity and Godot runtimes.
• Built-in tutorials and demo projects (NILA, Rigbytron, and a scene with both), also on the Demos page with their game-ready exports (demo content © Rigby2D, under its own demo license).

• In your browser: open the editor, nothing to install.
• Windows: download the portable editor or an installer from Releases.
• macOS: download the .dmg (Apple silicon and Intel). Linux: download the AppImage or the .deb from Releases. See Installation for the first start.
• AI assistants: install Rigby2D-AI.mcpb in Claude Desktop, or see the MCP guide.
• From source (Node.js 20+ and the Tauri prerequisites):

git clone https://github.com/jaisurya-dev-art/rigby2d.git
cd rigby2d
npm install
npm run dev        # desktop app; npm run web:dev for the browser, npm test for the tests

See Installation for every option.

src/core/       Runtime: data model, skeleton JSON/.skel + atlas I/O, pose evaluation, constraints, playback
src/editor/     Editor UI: viewport, tree, inspector, dopesheet, graph editor, import/export, scripting
src/webgl/      Reference WebGL renderer for the runtime
src/mcp/        Model Context Protocol server for AI assistants
runtimes/       Rust runtime and the Godot 4 node (preview)
site/           Website and documentation site (GitHub Pages)
docs/           Documentation pages and images
branding/       Logo, icons, Rigbytron and NILA (proprietary, see TRADEMARKS.md)
src-tauri/      Native desktop shell
test/           node:test suites

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup, coding style and pull request process.

Rigby2D's source code is licensed under either of

• MIT License
• Apache License, Version 2.0

at your option. © 2026 jaisurya-dev-art

Unless you state otherwise, any contribution you submit for inclusion in Rigby2D is licensed under both licenses as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

The editor distributes Pyodide and CPython for Python scripting under their own licenses; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Rigby2D, Rigbytron and NILA, and the Rigby2D logo, lockups, icons and the Rigbytron and NILA mascots in branding/, are proprietary trademarks of the Rigby2D project. They are not covered by the MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses. Forks and modified versions must use their own name and branding. See TRADEMARKS.md.

The DragonBones demo characters on the website (site/showcase/dragonbones/) are © The DragonBones team and other contributors, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, not the Rigby2D license.

Rigby2D is an independent open-source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the makers of any other animation software. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Rigby2D reads and writes the skeleton JSON, binary .skel and texture atlas file formats solely for interoperability, so that users can work with their own exported files. This support was implemented clean-room:

• JSON and atlas formats: implemented from publicly available documentation.
• Binary .skel format: implemented from the publicly documented binary layout of earlier versions and by comparing JSON and binary exports of the same skeleton (black-box observation of exported data).

No source code, runtimes, editor files or assets of other animation software are used or distributed with Rigby2D. Compatibility with files from any particular editor or runtime version is provided as-is and is not guaranteed.